Aug

28

carnivals of the week

Filed Under links | 1 Comment

The carnival of personal finance is up at free money finance. You can check out yet another post on insurance, or the following excellent posts:

I also submitted a great post on investing in your own home to the Carnival of Homeowners, I recommend taking a look at the following:

Finally, choosing the less lucrative career features in the Carnival of Money, Growth and Happiness. From this, I suggest that you read:

Aug

28

car sharing clubs

Filed Under frugal | 6 Comments

A car sharing club or scheme is a sort of mini car rental. You join the scheme and then you are entitled to rent a car, whenever one is available paying a per hour charge for the priviledge. I decided to look at Whizzgo, which have several locations across the country to see what circumstances they would be cost effective.

There are discounted deals for heavier users, but I’ll just compare the basic pay as you go package with owning a car.

For the purposes of this, I’ll assume that you don’t use your car for commuting as public transport is more convenient, but you need to do a weekly grocery shop on Wednesdays, the supermarket is about 5 miles from your house and it takes just over an hour and a half, and you also need to use a car for three hours on the weekends to run various errands, driving about 40 miles in the process.

With Whizzgo, the cost to join is £25, plus you need to pay a £125 insurance deposit. The fees to drive a Citroen C3 in Sheffield are £4.95 per hour which includes 30 miles, each extra mile is 20p. Insurance, fuel and maintenance are covered. There is a £250 excess on the insurance for drivers over 25. The cost would then be

Supermarket £4.95 x 2 = £9.90
Weekend Errands £4.95 x 3 + £0.20 x 10 = £16.85
Total Weekly Cost = £26.75
Joining fee £25
Insurance deposit £125
Total Annual Cost = £1541

Using the AA cost of car ownership tables for a car that cost less than £10K new we have the following costs for just owning the vehicle:

Road tax = 115
Insurance = 396
Cost of capital = 328
Depreciation (at 10,000 miles/annum) = 1132
Breakdown cover = 40
Total of Standing Costs = £2011

We haven’t even driven anywhere yet! If we add in the cost of actually driving 50 miles each week we have:

Petrol £0.0933 x 50 miles = £4.66
Tyres £0.005 x 50 miles = £0.25
Service labour costs £0.0289 x 50 miles = £1.44
Replacement parts £0.0161 x 50 miles = £0.80
Total Weekly Cost = £7.11
Total Annual Cost = £369.72

This gives the total cost of owning the car as:

Total Annual Cost = £2011 + £369.72 = £2380.72

So someone driving about 50 miles a week could save more than £800 by giving up their car and joining a car-sharing / car club scheme.

Aug

27

who do you donate to and why?

Filed Under ethics, giving | 10 Comments

I think that people should donate money or time, including atheists like me and theists, to good causes. I also think that you should carefully consider your choice of good causes.

I donate money to Oxfam, a large overseas aid and development charity, and to Scope, a charity that supports individuals with cerebral palsy. I am a member of Amnesty International and contribute a little bit of money there. I also donate time to a local organisation that promotes among other things inter-religious dialogue.

I explicitly chose to donate to Oxfam because overseas development is a cause that I believe is important, and it also presents are reasonable and realistic response to the HIV/Aids crisis in Africa and Asia, as well as campaigning on behalf of the disenfranchised.

I chose to become a member of Amnesty International and contribute money because I am aware that I have the privilege of living in a country with relative freedom of speech, press and conscience. Not everyone has this privilege.

I donate my time to the local organisation because I was asked to and because I believe that the organisation is important.

I donate to Scope because I was suckered into it at a train station once, and I haven’t got the heart to cancel a direct debit to a charity. I think that I would rather donate to Shelter, the homeless charity instead, as unwelcome things on your own doorstep tend to be forgotten.

Those of you that do donate money or time, who do you donate to and why?

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